This week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is hosting the 25th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/25). The agenda is focused, as it should be, on finalizing a longstanding discussion: the need for an international instrument to protect the rights of visually impaired persons and persons with print disabilities. Copyright protections create barriers for people with disabilities, yet big publishers continue to block efforts to create exceptions to remedy the problem even as hundreds of millions of people would stand to benefit worldwide.

As we noted last June, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Broadcast Treaty—which is a restrictive copyright treaty that aims to create and extend rights to signals of broadcasters and webcasters, and possibly creating serious problems for freedom of expression —is back. Although it has been revamped, it still incorporates the two most controversial proposals from the original treaty text. As concluded by an analysis comissioned by UNESCO back in 2006:

There is a chronic lack of material in formats accessible to the world’s visually impaired and print disabled citizens. Visually impaired people face a “book famine” in which 95% of books published in rich countries and 99% in poorer countries are never converted into accessible formats such as audio, large print or braille.1 The fastest way to address this famine is to change the copyright law: create exceptions and limitations that permit shifting of content into formats accessible to the blind, and allow cross-border exchange of content in accessible formats.

A new international treaty will add another layer of legal restrictions on audiovisual performances by giving the performers—actors, musicians, dancers and others—a new copyright-like right that will exist alongside copyright.